You may see some older tutorials where they were using sam package
but the task that this command is/was performing is now built into sam deploy
command so you don't need to perform it manually anymore.
The common order of calls today is init
-> build
-> deploy
.
As for the differences between those 2, build
preprocesses your project files locally while package
used to zip your project, push it to S3 bucket and returned a processed template (replacing code references) that you would subsequently deploy (this zipping, pushing to s3 and deploying is now handled by deploy
command).